I’ve been posting this on Whirlpool for quite some time, I may as well put it here. This steps you through how to upgrade the firmware on your Engin locked SPA-2000.

After the presentation at Melbourne Wireless’ monthly meeting, I have noticed a few updates with OpenWRT. It seems the latest version is actually code named White Russian. As normal, there are both the prebuilt binaries and source code available.

If you wish to know more about the captive portal setup I showed off at the meeting, contact me with your questions.

Having updated to Tiger on both my Apples here, I have to say that the collection of widgets available is just huge. They can do anything from look up a phone number, monitor web cams, or even post to my blog :). It’s the ultimate in organising little tools for various jobs. I currently have 3 clocks for different time zones around the world, the current weather, an app to monitor for available WiFi access, unit converter, Australian Yellow Pages directory, a Wikipedia look up tool, a live camera view of Sydney Harbour bridge, and the widget I’m using to write this post!

I have to say that these widgets are very useful indeed.

I got my cable going :) - One interesting thing that I did find however is that the PRM8030 radios really don’t like being hooked together with modem boards installed! Radios would key up without any activity, and just stay transmitting a carrier until the cross band cable was removed. I did some mods to the cable to allow LEDs to show which radio is transmitting, as well as a switch to enable/disable the cross band mode. After a bit of trial and error, this now works! I also had to install a relay to stop the mic audio being cut out even when the cross band was off!

On the wireless front, I will be doing a presentation on OpenWRT running on Linksys WRT54GS hardware at the next Melbourne Wireless meeting. Showing off a captive portal I have made which authenticates valid financial members of the group, and then allows them to use the internet connection free of charge. Nifty! There will also be a presentation on OSPF routing and a demo of this working via wifi at the meeting.

Today has been a challenging one. I went about creating a cross-band repeater cable for my radios in the car, so I can use a portable to access repeaters that I would only be able to get from the car. All was going well, and the circuit is built, when I plug it into one radio, then go to plug it into the other and realise that the plug gender is different. Oh. Pull the radio apart, and the cable looks stock.

Pull the radio that I checked the plug on, and sure enough, it’s different to all the others :(

It looks like this one radio has had custom equipment wired up to it at one point, probably some kind of external display, or maybe a panic circuit or some such - as the cable has been modified quite a bit. So, I now have a working cross band repeater cable - with the wrong gender plugs - and just after DSE has closed :| Guess what I’m doing tomorrow?